Forget about lines of musty books, ill-tempered librarians in opaque, horn-rimmed spectacles and an antiseptic silence - think of your library as providing "open and democratic access to the world of information". That's the message of Branching Out: A New Public Library Service, a report commissioned by Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, and launched in Ballyfermot library last week.

Among the other ambitious aims for the library service which the report isolates are that it should provide locally-based support for "life-long learning", "continue to provide access to the sum of human thought and imagination in a self-directed fashion", and "be a community-based support to literacy training and reading, particularly for young people". Thankfully, the importance of longer opening hours is stressed in the report.

To these ends, the annual allocation for the library service doubled in this year's Estimates, going up to about £6 million. This is in line with the recommendation of the report that £45 million would have to be invested in the service over the next eight years if it is to realise its potential.

The report also recommends that the Arts Council, in formulating and implementing the next Arts Plan, "should take account of the positive role that libraries can play in developing the full spectrum of the arts in Ireland". The Irish Times/An Chomhairle Leabharlanna essay competition about the library for young people, details of which were announced in this column last week, is an important tool for getting young people interested - but they shouldn't be so interested that they write too much. We stated that the essays should be more than 1,000 words, but what we meant, of course, was "not more than 1,000 words".